Why Missouri is the Trail State

One of David Kelly's earliest memories of Hartsburg is a pickup truck. This was early, the Katy Trail newly open and still bitterly argued over, and Kelly a young State Parks employee at the start of 36 years with the agency he would go on to run. The truck had a Stop the Katy Trail sticker on the back. In the bed were the kids' bicycles, because they were using it.

That truck is the argument of this essay in one tailgate. Missouri is officially the Show Me State, and will stay that way. The Cave State is well earned. Trail State is the name we are willing to argue for, and the case starts a long time before anybody in Hartsburg owned a bicycle.

Trails, then rails

Missouri has always been the place people set out from. Before there was a state there were the routes Native nations had used for centuries, and the French, the Spanish and then the Americans laid their roads on top of them. In the years around statehood, going west meant coming up the Missouri River as far as a boat could carry you and walking from there. The jumping-off point slid west as the boats improved, Arrow Rock first, then Independence.

That is where the great overland routes begin. The Santa Fe Trail opened in 1821 from Franklin, a river town in the Boonslick. Independence is the official start of the Oregon Trail by act of Congress. The California Trail outfitted at Independence and St. Joseph, and from St. Joseph the Pony Express rode for Sacramento. Four routes west, and every one of them started in this state, on this river.

Then the railroads did to the trails what the interstates would later do to the railroads. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas, the Katy, came to the north bank of the river late, because a rival had the south bank and there were no bridges. It crossed the river at Boonville on a span that still stands and opened along the north bank to St. Charles in 1896. Its stops sat five to seven miles apart, which was as far as a farmer could haul grain to an elevator, and every stop became a town: bars, hotels, livery stables, later garages. A fast freight called the Million Dollar Merchandise came through every night loaded for the Gulf.

What a railroad meant to a small town was three things at once: population, an economy, and an identity. We're a Katy town. Joel Rhodes directs the State Historical Society of Missouri and comes from three generations of railroaders.

The depots in those little towns were more than a place to put freight or buy your ticket. They became community centers, almost cathedrals.

Joel Rhodes, State Historical Society of Missouri

The railroads' best decade should have been the 1950s. But diesel meant the trains no longer stopped for water and coal, so the small towns that existed to service steam lost their reason to exist, and the interstate and the family car took the passengers. By the late 1960s passenger service was gone, the lines had consolidated into a few freight haulers, and a town that lost its railroad lost its growth and, with it, its sense of itself.

The check and the lawsuit

On October 4, 1986, the Missouri River flooded and tore up the Katy's track between Sedalia and Machens. The line had been losing money for years. The railroad chose not to rebuild it, and after ninety years on the north bank the Katy was finished.

Three years earlier Congress had amended the National Trails System Act to allow something called railbanking, a word that gets used as shorthand along the trail and rarely explained. It matters because of what would otherwise happen. Much of the Katy had been assembled in the 1890s as easements: the railroad bought the right to run trains across a farm, and the farmer kept the land underneath. Under Missouri law an easement like that dies when the trains stop, and the strip goes back to the farm. Railbanking changes that in one move. If someone agrees to take on the corridor as a trail, the federal regulator treats the line as never having been abandoned. It is held intact for the day a railroad might want it again, and the trail is the use in the meantime. Every crossing and every utility easement the railroad held stays in force, and State Parks, Kelly says, treats the corridor just like the railroad did. Nothing reverts, because in law nothing ended. Missouri was one of the first states to try it. What the law did not provide was money.

Ted Jones did. He was the son of the founder of Edward Jones and the man who built it into a firm of small-town offices, and he had already survived one round of cancer when the idea took hold of him in 1985. The cancer came back and stayed for the whole fight. When the chance came in 1986 he did not raise money from anyone. He wrote a check for two million dollars of his own and said: this is the chance of a lifetime, I'm going to buy this today before it's too late. The Joneses helped the state buy the corridor for $200,000, then paid for two pilot sections to prove the thing could work.

Ted was not a cyclist. He and his wife Pat had ridden a rail-trail in Wisconsin and come home with an idea about what a corridor like this could do for a state that, in the words of his friend and colleague Dan Burkhardt, has no seacoast, no mountains and no beaches.

Nobody is going to visit Tebbetts, Missouri, or Treloar, or Hartsburg, just to see those places. But if you can tell people those places are connected by the longest rail trail in America, following America's longest river across an entire state, people will come.

Dan Burkhardt, on what Ted Jones saw

The corridor ran through other people's farms, and many of the families along it assumed that when the railroad left, the land would come back to them. One family in Warren County farmed on both sides of it, the house on one side of the Katy and the hog barns on the other. The deed their grandparents had signed in the 1890s granted the railroad an easement "for a railroad, and for no other purposes." When the tracks came up they took that to be the end of it, and they learned from a newspaper clipping, three years later, that the state intended a public trail across their land.

They sued, and more than 1,100 landowners along the line joined them, with the Missouri Farm Bureau behind them. The river valley between Rhineland and Marthasville became the heart of the opposition, and the fight was bitter in ways that people along that stretch still remember.

The Eighth Circuit ruled against the landowners in 1989. On February 21, 1990, in a Vermont case that settled Missouri's, the Supreme Court upheld railbanking nine to nothing. Ten years after that the Court of Federal Claims agreed with the landowners on the other half of it: turning a railroad easement into a hiking trail was a taking of private property, and the government owed them for it. The trail stayed. The question of what was owed ran on for years. The objection was never really to bicycles. One of the plaintiffs made the point that this wasn't even eminent domain; eminent domain at least makes sure you get paid. Some of the people who fought it never came around, and this film does not pretend otherwise.

The trail

The first section opened on April 28, 1990, a cold spring morning in Rocheport. The governor cut the ribbon and more than a thousand people came. Ted Jones was too sick to walk it, so Kelly drove him and Pat down the trail in a golf cart. Ted died that October, five years after the idea and six months after the ribbon.

Pat carried it for 28 years. She had been the first woman to graduate from the University of Missouri's School of Agriculture, and much of what State Parks now does to get people onto the trail who cannot ride it came out of conversations with her. She gave the family farm to the state as a conservation area in 1997 and kept turning up at trail events until she died in 2018. People called her the mother of the Katy Trail.

The trail did not arrive all at once. Union Pacific donated the 33 miles from Sedalia to Clinton in 1991. The great flood of 1993 put 75 of the trail's first 126 miles underwater, and 1995 flooded it again. St. Charles to Sedalia was finished in 1996, Sedalia to Clinton in 1999, and the last stretch east to Machens in 2011. Brett Dufur, who has written the Katy Trail guidebook since 1995 and has just sent the twelfth edition to press, says the honeymoon never ended.

Some of the people who fought it changed their minds. A farmer in Hartsburg had been against the trail from the start. Once it opened, he and his wife got their bikes out and rode every evening, and his doctor told him he did not know what he was doing, but to keep doing it. Kelly filmed him on the riverbank behind his house.

I've been all over the world. I was in the Navy. And there's not a prettier place in the world than this spot right behind me, this view where the river makes a bend and the sun sets on the water.

A Hartsburg farmer who had fought the trail, as David Kelly remembers him

What the trail does to a town is measurable now. The Katy is a state park a hundred feet wide and 237 miles long, the longest developed rail-trail in the country, and the University of Missouri surveyed its visitors for State Parks in the last three months of 2025. The figures are below. Missouri is one of seven states where the parks are free, paid for by a sales tax of a tenth of a percent that voters must renew every ten years. On August 4, 2026, they renewed it with 82.3 percent, and it carried every county.

Hartsburg has 108 people and a pumpkin festival, started the year after the trail opened, that draws twenty-five thousand a day. Tebbetts is a farm town where an old general store is now a hostel with bunk beds, and where a local family will meet you at the trailhead with a hot meal if you call ahead. We did a head count at the Treloar Bar and Grill one afternoon: half the customers had come off the trail and half were local, and the locals have a bar because of the half who rode in. Dufur calls the trail Missouri's longest welcome mat.

The Rock Island

Bruce Sassman represents District 61 in the Missouri House. He grew up in a Rock Island railroad town, the kid who jumped boxcars and laid pennies on the rail, and he watched the town shrivel when the trains stopped. On December 14, 2021, the corridor's owner, a subsidiary of Ameren, gave the state 144 miles of the old Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific line, Windsor to Beaufort, at no cost. Joined to the 47 miles already open and to the Katy at both ends, it makes a loop of about 450 miles from the parking lot at Arrowhead Stadium to the Arch. Sassman calls it the Heart of Missouri loop and points out that nowhere else in the world has one.

The St. Louis end is being built too. Great Rivers Greenway's Brickline Greenway is a set of trails through the middle of the city, Fairground Park to Grand Center to the Arch, and the idea behind it is Ted's idea moved into town: bring people to places they've had no reason to go. Penny Pennington, who runs Edward Jones now and co-chairs the fundraising for it, calls the Brickline the urban version of the Katy Trail. She has ridden the Katy end to end twice on the Tour de Ted.

It is not the Katy again. The Rock Island crosses the Ozark hills, with four tunnels, one of them 1,661 feet long, and a bridge over the Gasconade River 1,700 feet long and a hundred feet up. The money to build it came within one vote. A few years ago the governor asked the legislature for $69.3 million; the House passed it, and in the Senate a single member blocked it. The film does not name the senator and neither will this page. What has happened since is what happened on the Katy forty years ago. With no state money, the towns are building it themselves, a mile in Gerald, three in Owensville, three more in Gasconade County. Every day, Sassman says, there are a few feet of trail being built.

It may be a trail instead of a train, but it's a rebirth nonetheless.

Bruce Sassman, Missouri House of Representatives

Connie Burkhardt, who has watched the funding come and go, said the sharper thing: the Trail State is a mantle now, other states are spending real money to take it, and Missouri cannot declare itself the Trail State and then sit down.

Where the name came from

When we started this film we did not have a title. Early in the research a phrase turned up: American Trails, a national nonprofit, had named Missouri its Best Trails State for 2013, an award it gives every two years to the state that has done the most for its trails. Terrain Magazine ran the story in January 2014, and then the phrase went quiet.

We took the name for two reasons. It was already true. And the word state does three jobs. There's the State of Missouri. There's the state of the trail, which is what most of this essay is about. And there's the state of affairs: the funding that came within one vote, the loop that's still a dotted line on the map above, the other states spending money to take the title. A trail film would've been a short one. This is a film about a state.

On September 17, 2026, Governor Mike Kehoe signed a proclamation naming September 22 as Trail State Day, the day this film premiered at the Missouri History Museum. It is a piece of paper. Nobody in the film would tell you a piece of paper is the point. Asked what the phrase meant to him, Rhodes did not mention bicycles. The Trail State, he said, is the movement of people through Missouri for centuries, Native nations and French and Spanish and Americans of every kind, and a good many of those trails ended here and stayed for generations. This is a state that people have always set out from, and that has decided, more than once, not to sell the way out for scrap.

See all 237 miles on the map →Show the film in your town →